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The Military

Scientists Turn T-Shirts Into Body Armor 213

Posted by timothy from the will-stick-with-the-regular-kind-for-now dept.
separsons writes "Scientists at the University of South Carolina recently transformed ordinary T-shirts into bulletproof armor. By splicing cotton with boron, the third hardest material on the planet, scientists created a shirt that was super elastic but also strong enough to deflect bullets. Xiaodong Li, lead researcher on the project, says the same tech may eventually be used to create lightweight, fuel-efficient cars and aircrafts."
Apple

Submission + - Apple’s iTunes Pitch: TV for $30 a Month (allthingsd.com)

Submitted by wkurzius
wkurzius writes: Apple is looking to compete head on with the cable companies with a subscription-based service for television. "Would you pay $30 a month to watch TV via iTunes? That'(TM)s the pitch Apple has been making to TV networks in recent weeks. The company is trying to round up support for a monthly subscription service that would deliver TV programs via its multimedia software..."
Science

Submission + - Scientists use brain scans to read minds (itpro.co.uk)

Submitted by nk497
nk497 writes: University of California researchers have figured out how to read people's minds by looking at brain scans. Scientists could predict which of eight tasks a test subject was thinking about by looking at the scans correctly about 80 per cent of the time. But it's not Minority Report quite yet, Russell Poldrack, a professor of psychology at UCLA, said. "Our study suggests that the kinds of things that some people have talked about in terms of mind reading are probably still pretty far off," he said. "If we are only 80 per cent accurate with eight very different thoughts and we want to figure out what you're thinking out of millions of possible thoughts, we're still very far away from achieving that."
Government

Submission + - Military enlists open source community (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
jmwci1
jmwci1 writes: "The U.S. Defense Department is enlisting an open source approach to software development — an about-face for such a historically top-down organization.

In recent weeks, the military has launched a collaborative platform called Forge.mil for its developers to share software, systems components and network services. The agency also signed an agreement with the Open Source Software Institute to allow 50 internally developed workforce management applications to be licensed to other government agencies, universities and companies."
Google

Submission + - google locks out normanfinkelstein.com. Possibly. (philipweiss.org) 2

Submitted by tinkerton
tinkerton writes: Google doesn't show any search results for site:normanfinkelstein.com ,and doesn't list the site if you type 'norman finkelstein'. Finkelstein is a very vocal critic of Israel's policies. Is there a technical explanation for this?
Portables (Apple)

Submission + - Apple switching to quanity over quality? (digitimes.com) 1

Submitted by Trintech
Trintech writes: Apple has reportedly placed orders for 100 million 8Gb NAND flash chips. (Note: The chips hold 8 Gigabits which equals 1 GigaByte) This is an odd move for Apple because they generally use much higher density chips even in small storage products like the 4GB iPod shuffle which uses a single 32Gb NAND chip. There has been some speculation as to what Apple might do with all these low density chips and, as usual, Apple refuses to comment.

1GB iPod Femto anyone?

Comment Re:How you get hooked (Score 1) 700

by seminumerical (#27499509) Attached to: Beware the Perils of Caffeine Withdrawal

The 4 one minute sprints twice a week is not, that I know, of a recommended form of exercise. The researchers were interested in the minimum amount of exercise out of scientific curiosity.

As you can imagine they experimented with other schedules less than and greater than 4 min x 2 time per week. Blood sugar was under excellent control with the minimum stated.

Strength, flexibility, co-ordination, fat loss, etc. are other considerations: but they did demonstrate their hypothesis that you need to deplete energy from your muscles to make room to sop up glucose in the blood.

p.s., you can imagine the horror we will soon face on late night TV as an infomercial selling a cheap exercise bike promises you CONTROL DIABETES AND LOSE WEIGHT WITH 8 MINUTES EXERCISE A WEEK. NO MONEY DOWN, PAY IN 8 EASY INSTALLMENTS, IF YOU ORDER NOW YOU GET A FREE ABERCISER. ORDER NOW OPERATORS ARE STANDING BY ...
Earth

Submission + - Powerful Sonar Causes Deafness in Dolphins 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Mass strandings could be caused because dolphins are rendered temporarily deaf by military sonar, experiments have shown. Tests on a captive dolphin have demonstrated that hearing can be lost for up to 40 minutes on exposure to sonar and may explain several strandings of dolphins and whales in the past decade. Most strandings are still thought to be natural events, but the tests strengthen fears that exercises by naval vessels equipped with sonar are responsible for at least some of them. For example, in the Bahamas in March 2000, 16 Cuvier's beaked whales and Blainville's beaked whales and a spotted dolphin beached during a US navy exercise in which sonar was used intensively for 16 hours (pdf). "The big question is what causes them to strand," says Dr. Aran Mooney, of the University of Hawaii. "What we are looking at are animals whose primary sense is hearing, like ours is seeing. Their ears are the most sensitive organ they have." In the experiment scientists fitted a harmless suction cup to the dolphin's head, with a sensor attached that monitored the animal's brainwaves and when the pings reached 203 decibels and were repeated, the neurological data showed the mammal had become deaf, for its brain no longer responded to sound. "We definitely showed that there are physiological and some behavioral effects [from repeated, loud sonar], but to extrapolate that into the wild, we don't really know," said Mooney."
Idle

Submission + - Chimpanzees exchange meat for sex (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
the_therapist
the_therapist writes: "A team from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, studied chimps in the Tai Forest reserve in Ivory Coast and discovered that chimpanzees enter into "deals" whereby they exchange meat for sex.

Among the findings are that "male chimps that are willing to share the proceeds of their hunting expeditions mate twice as often as their more selfish counterparts". They also found this to be "a long-term exchange, so males continue to share their catch with females when they are not fertile, copulating with them when they are"."

Comment Re:How you get hooked (Score 1) 700

by seminumerical (#27496833) Attached to: Beware the Perils of Caffeine Withdrawal

Yes. If you are addicted to caffeine, although a large amount of caffeine will keep you awake, a small amount can promote sleep.

Despite my claim to never drink tea or coffee after 4 p.m. I occasionally take a 1/4 cup of tea before bed if I need to get to sleep quickly because I'll be rising early.

This is in proportion to how much tea/coffee I drink during the day: 2 or rarely 3 cups. I've known 6 cup a day coffee drinkers to drink an entire cup of coffee before bed. (I've also known them to have anxiety, shaky hands, and logorrhea)
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Sued for $558 Million Over Uniloc Patent (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: Microsoft has been served papers claiming their state of the art product activation system infringes on a Singapore based company named Uniloc's patent. Bloomberg is reporting that a lawyer for Uniloc asked a federal court for $558 million in royalties from Microsoft. The official court order is here in PDF. This concerns the activation system of Windows XP operating system and some Office programs--Uniloc has decided that royalties of $2.50 for each of the 223 million activations is a fair price for Microsoft to pay. The patent ax swings both ways. The two seem to have a long history of court action.

Comment Re:How you get hooked (Score 5, Interesting) 700

by seminumerical (#27491663) Attached to: Beware the Perils of Caffeine Withdrawal
Yes I have 2 citations. This is an informal setting so I didn't go looking for them just now. One is the Berkeley Wellness Letter (a monthly publication associated with the Berkeley School of Public Health). There have been numerous references to keeping blood sugar from spiking and on the types of sugar that are worse for you, e.g., fructose. The other was from a Science podcast (or was it Nature?) on research on the "minimum" amount of exercise needed for health. In it they remarked that the longer sugar remains in your bloodstream the more cumulative damage it does to your arteries.

The minimum amount of exercise was, interestingly enough, 4 one minute sprints on an exercise bicycle, all out, as hard as you can go with no holding back. You can take a break after each sprint for a short while to catch your breath. Do this twice a week.

The test subject and controls were from time to time given a glass of glucose water, and the experimenters measured how long it took to clear the sugar from the blood.

The theory was this. The muscles have a ready reserve of energy and resist taking more from the blood unless you deplete some of it. Experiments indicate that the benefits of this "minimum" exercise program last for weeks after ceasing it.

This is not my field and I could not tell you why sugar in the blood is bad for you, or why certain sugars are worse. However, I understand that the Berkley Wellness Letter and Science/Nature are evidence based publications. Anyone not credulous can spend about an afternoon looking these things up, though a library is probably better than the internet because many relevant publications are not free.

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